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I like to be informed, however I wouldn’t call whatever happens on lemmy as information sharing but more like endless ranting. I get it it is what it is but I think it is healthier to have more than one topic
On the plus side my internet usage went down because I just do news check up daily and I lose desire to use internet further
Yeah, it’s not easy to ignore when the US goverment starts sending people to concentration camps and being anti-american.
Can’t just bury your head in the sand and say you don’t care about politics, because then changes will come as a surprise
" why did I get laid off without severance? oh, they rolled back labor laws.
At least I have welfare as I search for a job… oh, they took that too.
Well, next elections I’ll be voting against them. Wdym Trump is on his third term and planning a fourth one?
Why are ICE officers taking me to a plane, without due process, claiming I’m being anti-patriotic?) "
While true, not all Lemmy is american.
Yep, that’s on me. I’m just used to talk to americans when I’m met with a “I don’t care about politics”
Yeah, that “I don’t care about politics is what brought them there in the first place”, but they will never acknowledge that, instead they will just double down on their aggressive apatheism.
Sounds like their problem, not mine. They voted for it, I wouldn’t expect you to care much about British internal politics either.
While Musk and Trump were doing their thing in the US, Musk was also trying to prop certain parties around europe. Reform (UK), AfD (Germany), Vox (Spain), Lega (Italy) Their internal politics are similar to that of Germany before WW2, plus their external politics are: pulling from NATO, stopping the funding that goes to the CVE, threatening annexation of allies… so I wouldn’t be surprised if internal politics are indicative of following the path of Germany.
If UK were actively threatening allies, saying they won’t support NATO countries if they are attacked, and one of thekr citizes was close to the PM and was also trying to sway elections in the rest of europe, I’d be as concerned as you internal politics to see where you wpuld be going.
There maybe a balance between getting informed of the big lines of what’s happening in the US (which is of course valuable) and spamming until it’s 100% of everybody’s timeline
Which are topics covered by 90% of the forums here already. If you browse for memes you should be allowed to see some. instead you get AOC Simps sharing some rally.
Blocking users posting political campaigning on meme forums are now modus operandi.
Try posting that shit on the woodworking forum and see how it flies. The meme forums are poorly moderated.
Have you considered… that political memes… are memes as well? I know, crazy, right?
Have you even considered how tariffs could affect woodworking prices? The price of services to keep with the increase of the cost of living, the increase in the price of any woodworking material/tool coming from out of the US…
Have you considered… that political memes… should be posted to the communities specifically for political memes? I know, crazy, right?
If someone wants to bury their head in the sand while everything burns, that’s their perogative.
Personally, I get more than enough exposure to the ongoing situation through other sources. I don’t need my haha funnies to pull double duty, and I’d argue that they’re an incredibly poor format to convey useful information for staying properly informed.
I definitely don’t need random internet asshole busybodies deciding they know my information needs better than I do.
They might not bury their head in the sand either. They might be engaged in the topics, but at the moment they just want to see what funny references exist in a non political sphere.
A picture of a crowd with the headline AOC and Sanders gathered 35000 people this weekend is hardly a meme.
Have you considered I might be European? And I might be somewhat interested in American politics, but I’m also interested in other shit to. If Lemmy wants to succeed it will have to cater to a wider audience than the most politically engaged core.
Blocking a few users have cleansed my front page alot. I hake no issues with people discussing their political worries. Thats imoortant in any free State. What’s not important is forcing those discussions into any minor irrelevant topic.
American tarriff could affect woodworking price in the US and maybe in canada or his main trade partner
You are not the center of the world. Crazy right?
Can’t just bury your head in the sand and say you don’t care about politics
I can actually and science proves it’s better for mental health.
Not wanting to follow donald ducks disastrous adventures isn’t burying your head in the sand IMO.
Yeah, it’s not easy to ignore when the US goverment starts sending people to concentration camps
You had no problem ignoring it for decades previously.
Please, enlighten me about how it is as bad now as it was before, and not even worse.
“Yeah, they are sending random innocent citizens to concentration camps in mass now, but you didn’t care about it when it was certain specific innocent people to Guantanamo so you shouldn’t care about this either”
Sounds like someone who would say “all parties are the same” or “I didn’t want to vote for Kamala because the dems supported Israel”
Because foreign lives actually are worth just as American ones.
Yeah, who said otherwise?? The problem is that it’s being done en mass now, not that it’s american lives per se. Yeah, it was a problem already, but it became a bigger problem now. You can’t ignore that.
It was being en mass before. The only difference is that now it’s effecting (non African) Americans.
Sure bro
Americans when they realize they’re wrong, but are to much arrogance pieces of shit to admit it.
I’m a little lost as to what exactly this rebuttal is implying. Do you feel that those who willfully ignored these issues went they weren’t as dire should continue to do so as they get worse? I’m having difficulty reading this charitably so clarification would be appreciated, thanks.
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“Is he team Red or team Green?”
*Little did they know that beneath his outer attire lay his blue wizard robes.*
“I mean he’s wearing boots, which is more than either of us have.”LOL
It would be nice if we had elected the boring president yeah.
We outside of the US didn’t even have any say in the elections and are subjected to your constant, and I mean constant political shit.
It’s all so tiring
As someone inside of the country, I’m also tired.
I feel so bad for you. Now excuse me while I go back to living inside of it.
At least you got a say in it. Not that all that many of you used your voice.
Have you considered asylum? As an european i would support the UE taking applications from the US.
Of course it should only be granted those of you who voted for a genocider get prison sentences
** Stares in Turkish **
It would have been nice if 45% of the eligible voting population didn’t already check out last year. It would have been nice if there weren’t countless posts by bots on reddit saying “I really hate all this politics” in a concerted, ongoing effort to make people like OP tune out and not care.
I mean, I get that it’s hard sometimes to always see what’s happening in the world, but you have the option to turn it all off. But expecting to just get the content that appeals to your mood at the moment and lets you avoid responsibility, that’s fucking childish.
When you’re a child you can avoid the world. You’re supposed to be protected from the world. You grow up and BAM now you’re part of shit. No, you don’t get out of it. No, you don’t get to escape whenever you want. Sorry, we didn’t sign up for it either but we know what we have to do so we’re concerned about events and trying to communicate that concern so that evil doesn’t flourish. (Much further.)
It’s really easy to blame non-voters when you have the privilege of civic literacy, do not face voter disenfranchisement, do not live paycheck to paycheck, do not have a job that will fire you for ‘other reasons’ when you take off to vote, do not have an abusive spouse that will watch you fill in your mail in ballot if you vote, do not have to walk an hour away to the voting poll because you can’t drive, do not have a permanent address for a mail in ballot, so on and so forth.
Yes, there are lazy ‘I’m not political’ morons who are willfully ignorant and don’t vote. But let’s not pretend that everything about American infrastructure including car dependency, anti-homelessness laws, understaffed voting polls, centralized media and fake news, aren’t all designed to make voting harder than it should be and disproportionately target minorities.
It’s really easy to blame non-voters when you have the privilege of civic literacy
This is a helluva line I that I’m absolutely stuck on.
I don’t even know how to approach it… civic literacy as a privilege? I feel like that’s an entirely new term invented as a way of avoiding accountability tbh. I get that it’s hard to vote, and I get people who have to work all the time, but I don’t get pushback against the idea that we’re just not making the effort or trying to push through challenges for a better future. Fuck that, I don’t care. Ya’ll gonna learn one way or another what accountability means.
Getting a quality education or having parents who did is a privilege. No baby was born knowing how to vote. The vast majority of non-voters don’t even know how to start, let alone how to take time off to vote or when their mail-in ballot window is. Many might not have the required IDs and need to jump through another hoop to vote.
To non-voters, the voting process can be as daunting as getting your driver’s license the first time, except they’re doing it alone, juggling 3 jobs and raising kids. They simply don’t have the time or mental energy to go through bureaucracy and mentally keeping every deadline and paperwork in their minds.
Civic literacy is a privilege because the fact that you understand the importance of voting and know enough about the process to plan ahead of it means that you grew up in circumstances that allowed you to do so.
Calling people lazy for not voting is like calling people assholes for not buying cage-free eggs. t’s very easy to not give a shit about either when you’re living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s very easy to perceive complaints about this as virtue signalling.
You’re not getting anyone to vote by calling them lazy. Don’t be angry. Be useful and be actionable. If you actually want more people to vote, understand the systemic barriers behind why so many don’t vote, educate others on it, and make a difference.
Me who was denied an education and raised by a cult family in the wilderness for the first 20 years, and had to escape and learn everything and get an education on my own, and still somehow managed to learn the importance of voting for qualified candidates, reading this and taking notes
The election was completely fraudulent. Our country did NOT vote for this. Watching people rip each other apart over “how we voted” is painful because ALL OF IT IS FICTION.
The election was real.
The millions of contentious voices on Facebook, twitter, reddit and so on were not. They used the KGB handbook to play the basic tactic of amplifying the worst contention on both sides of literally every issue, leaving the general, moderate population absolutely checked out and uninterested in involvement.
When you don’t feel connected to your community, what do you do? You ignore it, you don’t work to better it.
While I say this was from the KGB handbook (literally) I don’t think they were the only forces at work, I think it’s just an effective tactic that everyone who wants to control or subvert the richest, most powerful nation on earth (a nation already sabotaged by “fierce individualism”) will readily employ so that democracy no longer stands between them and the prize.
When the goal is “line go up for infinity” the soil itself is a commodity that will be dug up and sold. I really feel like ya’ll still aren’t realizing what’s happening. Almost half the population didn’t get involved, and the ones who did had no media literacy or involvement in politics, as evident by the absolutely bonkers exit polling. We’re at that scene in the Die Hard sequel where the dump trucks are driving the gold out of the city.
So everything is crystal clear to you? Lmao. The election was falsified, the bots online are fake to give the fake election numbers credence. This isn’t rocket surgery. I feel like maybe you don’t understand what’s happening.
I can already tell I won’t enjoy conversing about this with you, it’s okay, have a good one.
Not everybody’s american you dumb idiot. Of course i’m sick of all the yank spam. It’s not my country. It doesn’t make me a bot
It seems like you’re directing this at me, and I can say that ultimately before November 5th I would have nodded my head in agreement. For basically the last 20 years I’ve been more or less obsessively following politics. I’ve voted in every election, primaries, midterms, special elections, local elections, and general. I’ve canvassed and donated. I’ve perpetually kept my eye on the news and participated in a invite-only political debate sub-reddit back in my reddit days. I’ve advocated IRL at my own workplace, risking my job security.
But now I’m verging on suicidally disinterested. After this result I want to disconnect so fucking badly. I want to check out and it feels like there is no escape. I don’t even enjoy my “escapes” like video games, movies/TV, books as much as I used to. All of it feels like a grey sludge while a radioactive fire burns the world.
And the problem is, even if things get sorted out, I will never want to care again. Even if the US fixes its major problems I will forever be disgusted with the majority of my fellow citizens and be ambivalent about most of their well being. I am permanently mentally isolated after this election. The rest of my life seems intrinsically and inescapably dimmer.
Will I care anyway? Yes eventually and inevitably, I’ll feel emotionally pulled to care. Its just how my brain works. And I will resent it. I resent it now.
It seems like you’re directing this at me,
I actually wasn’t but I do appreciate the brutally honest and non-combative reply, this is exactly the window into how the foreign and domestic forces working tirelessly to amplify contention and hate have subverted our very spirit and left us not wanting to care about anything anymore.
This isn’t entirely the fault of the population, but the population can and should at least more informed of this tactic so they don’t doom-scroll the worst clips and gifs, the pandering content, the screaming matches and “debates” and news stories from dubious outlets. We need to do this so we all take better care of our minds, this is part of the whole story… your mind is vulnerable and selfish forces will sell out your mental wellbeing and sovereignty so they can keep making line go up.
If you take care of your mind like your body, if you take care with what you put into it, it will be stronger and healthier and you can make better decisions. This is why they are attacking the very notion of “mental health” by the way. They want a depressed, checked-out population of serfs working the fields and buying the latest iPhone as soon as it lands.
You were fanatically supportive of genocide, while heaping venom and hatred on the people who oppose it; I don’t think anyone cares what you are ‘disgusted’ by. Your boos mean nothing, we’ve seen what makes you cheer.
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Americans really do think their politics is just another tv show. I’ll let you in on a secret, the problem with Trump is not that he isn’t “boring”
“May you live in interesting times” is not a blessing.
Yeah, and it doesn’t matter if the politicians overseeing those times are “boring”
Biden was boring. It was a welcome reprieve from daily scandals and, at minimum, monthly constitutional crises. Now we’re moving to weekly constitutional crises. Functional government is boring. It’s mostly bureaucratic regulatory bookkeeping.
It’s certainly possible to not be boring in a positive way, for instance if a politician is loudly advocating for radical positive change. But statistically speaking, boring is less harmful than the alternative.
That’s also why Trump was so effective at getting votes.
It’s a lot harder to argue when you’re following laws and being honest. You’re at a severe disadvantage (same as Kamala)
Trump doesn’t care about the truth, he doesn’t care about law, and because he KNOWS he can’t pardon himself for state crimes (like tax fraud in New York), despite being president, he WILL likely go to prison after his term. There is NO incentive for him to do whats right, and everything he does at this point, is driven by keeping himself out of prison.
For anyone else, civil war would be terrible. For Trump, starting a civil war means he can claim its “war time” and postpone elections. We’ve already seen how low he’s planning to stoop to.
Biden spent a year committing genocide
So did every president since Israel existed. The non-boring president didn’t stop that genocide, he blocked a lot of aid we were sending Ukraine, and unblocked a lot of aid we weren’t sending Israel. At least Biden wasn’t trying to turn Gaza into his own resort. This is objectively worse than boring Biden.
So did every president since Israel existed
I’m comfortable writing off anyone trying to claim the last year and a half in Gaza is just “business as usual” is a genocide denying fascist who would have said of the Holocaust “eh, Jews have been descriminated against in Germany for centuries”.
Like, you don’t even deserve to live, let alone have a “boring government”.
I did.
It would be nice if the boring president actually tried to win.
They did try to win. They just didn’t try to win the way YOU wanted them to. Strategically speaking, going for centrists was the right move, even if you were a progressive candidate. They assumed that they already had the left in the bag, and we’re trying to target independent and centrist votes. Nobody would have thought that the left would just…let Trump win because of some bullshit purity politics. But hey, now that the left has let a fascist into power, we won’t have to worry about voting anymore. Super smart power move progressives. A+. You played yourselves.
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Strategically speaking, going for centrists was the right move, even if you were a progressive candidate.
That’s why they won in 2016 and 2024, right?
Stupid ass shit like what you just said is the kind of shit that lost to fascism twice now and look at you, still saying it! Keep going, I’m sure losing a third time will be great
now that the left has let a fascist into power
Liberals love blaming leftists when shit goes bad even when it’s their garbage ideas that got us here. Fuck right off
Lol okay. You make it sound like running a campaign is so easy. Maybe you should run the next one.
If you go with a full progressive or overtly leftist campaign you will also lose. You will gain votes from the “purity politics” left from people like you but you will lose the support of so much of the centrist/independent block.
43% of the US population identifies as independent. 27% identifies as Democrat. We don’t have a large enough voting base to win by ourselves without independent/centrist votes. If you abandon them as well, we also lose. Conservatives can always count on their base to vote for whoever… apparently we’ve learned that we can’t do that with progressives. It’s apparently our way or we sink the whole fucking boat with everyone in it. We apparently only vote for the PERFECT candidate, or we just won’t vote at all…or vote 3rd party.
If you go with a full progressive or overtly leftist campaign you will also lose.
The last time Democrats tried, they won a super majority.
centrist/independent
Notice how you’ve just assumed based on nothing that independents are all “centrists” who don’t vote Democrats because they’re too progressive. Which is wrong.
We apparently only vote for the PERFECT candidate
People don’t want to vote for people who see “actively genocidal” as “not perfect”
Yeah mate…back in 1932. I’m sure nothing’s really changed since then. And if you think we’ve had a “progressive” candidate since then… I’d LOVE to hear this hot take.
I was talking about Obama, who ran a progressive campaign.
Also, if you believe that Democrats haven’t run a progressive campaign in 90 years, you have ZERO leg to stand on saying it would lose.
You make it sound like running a campaign is so easy.
It’s not, at all. Spotting a repeated mistake IS pretty easy, though
you will lose the support of so much of the centrist/independent block
Prove it. Leftist ideas are liked by the majority of the country when asked without labels, so you’re talking out your ass.
43% of the US population identifies as independent
A lot of those are leftists who don’t associate with the DNC. I would know, I’m a member of a group of them who all get talk about politics. I’m literally a member of the group you’re claiming wouldn’t vote for a more left candidate and I’ll tell you: the majority of us would
Conservatives can always count on their base to vote for whoever… apparently we’ve learned that we can’t do that with progressives
Progressives aren’t the Democratic base, but nice try shifting the blame. Democrats are right-wing and are losing votes because of it. Look at 2024 in CA and see the millions of votes lost because they went centrist
We apparently only vote for the PERFECT candidate, or we just won’t vote at all
Either troll or so stupid you’re not worth engaging further on, just holy shit what a stupid reduction
The last 4 Democratic Presidents have ALL been just barely left of center - Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Carter. The last true progressive we tried to run back was in '72 against Nixon and we lost so incredibly badly that people backed FAR away from trying to run a progressive candidate…go look at the results, they’re pretty insane.
Amazing how one election 50 years ago is enough to conclude that progressives can never win elections ever, but endlessly running conservative Democrats and eating shit just means you need to tack harder right. Not to mention that Obama ran considerably to the left of any other recent democrat candidate and cleaned up.
So, since they did not in fact “have the left in the bag,” “going for centrists” was not, in fact, “strategically speaking the right move.” Even by your own dumbass reasoning you’re wrong.
This excuse is rolled out every time your favorite “centrists” eat shit, which is most of the time. The underlying logic that moving right is the way to win is above critique, no matter how many times it’s tried and failed. The Democratic party and their candidates and campaigns are all of course above critique, they can never fail, they can only be failed. You can only ever punch down and tell voters to change their behavior to accommodate the candidate’s positions, and never tell the candidate they should accommodate their constituents. The whole concept of democracy is meaningless at that point, just a popularity contest for which face will do the same awful shit, a game for rich sociopaths to fight over prestige and position, rather than a way for common people to have any sort of influence whatsoever over policy.
The left warned them loudly and clearly and they ignored us, as they always do. If course, we weren’t the entire reason they lost, although I wish we were, because if we have the power and will to deny them wins, then they have no choice but to give into our demands or fade into irrelevance. Exercising this power is the only possible way to make them listen, or, if they won’t listen, it’s conveniently also the way to go about creating a new party that will.
“our strategy was correct, it’s reality that was wrong.”
27% of the US voting base is Democrat. 43% is centrist.
Do you lean hard to progressive politics and abandon independents or do you try and capture centrists and hope that your voting base understands that the opponent is a literal fascist?
You. Lost.
Your strategy objectively was wrong.
Didn’t really answer the question…but okay.
Hindsight is 20/20.
If we run a full progressive candidate we will also for sure lose. But at least we’ll all feel warm and fuzzy inside that we picked a wonderful candidate. It’s a knife edge, if we want to only pander to our base, we will for sure lose support of many centrists.
You were told this before the election, repeatedly. You can invoke hindsight
If we run a full progressive candidate we will also for sure lose.
The last time the Democrats tried, they won a super majority
When things are on fire you tend to see a bunch of smoke. Just sayin…
Unless it’s a clean burning propane
Taste the meat not the heat.
You don’t, by chance, happen to sell propane and propane accessories?
Damnit Bobby
That boy ain’t right
I’m sayin man dang’ol bobby may’nt be no pick o the litter man but he’s uh got a got good ol heart man I mean dang he got that ol charisma man if he ain’t right I mean i dang ol … don’t wanna be right.
I’ve always thought that saying was weird. If I’m specifically grilling, I want to taste the heat. The smoky aroma is what makes grilling special to me. If you just want to taste the meat, it isn’t that different to using a pan imo. That’s why I like coal grills but prefer a wood fire, though that can be unpractical for some stuff
Using a pan and a propane grill are vastly different imo. I dont dislike charcoal or wood. I think each has thier own place depending on the meal you are preparing. For example I like to make steak and chicken kabobs on a propane grill and burgers and hotdogs on a charcoal.
At the end of the day though seasoning and meat quality take center stage. So its all about what you have access to and can afford.
For me grilling is less about just food preparation and more about the different experience of using a grill and the different taste you got from it. So with propane, even though it makes food prep a lot easier and more consistent, much more convienient, it loses the taste aspect so a big part of the whole thing is missing for me. It’s all about what aspects you value and how much.
Or one of those cool decorative indoor ethanol candles
Exactly. It’s like being in a house that’s on fire, laying down for a nap, and complaining when the flames make it too bright to sleep. You can ignore it and move deeper inside the house to nap like you used to, but there’s no fire brigade this time.
I have a filter on Elon and Trump
It was too much
Same but some don’t tag their posts and I still see some posts slip through maybe I should block the news communities.
I don’t mind the odd post, sometimes it can be relevant and important topics . But those two words balances it out.
Yea my current blovklist looks like this. And I still see a bunch of stuff for them.
maga, politics, biden, trump, republican, elon musk, musk, elon, conservative, rfk, election, russia, russianLooks like this one slid through. Maybe add “political”
Yea good call I’ll a that one as well.
if it’s that bad, I honestly think you shouldn’t be online.
Not kidding, you need to take better care of yourself if it’s at the point where you’re setting filters and still getting stressed seeing political content, you’re not helping yourself escaping online.
There have to be some other things you can do, places you can go, activities you can occupy yourself with or people you can hang out with.
Because man… this shit happening right now is big, it’s history, it’s going to be really, really hard to escape it online because there are millions and millions of people far more involved and worried and trying to communicate their concerns.
Me too, it was needed.
You gotta block the bots that post news stories to communities named after the publication.
Really clears up the feed.
Also try to get the more spammy ones blocked by your server, it’s a service for all other users as well
I am leaning harder and harder on ‘political comedy isn’t comedy’ as a rule. ‘It’s just a joke,’ is a far too common smokescreen for people pushing terrible ideas and mocking people spreading bad ideas doesn’t do anything to stop them. It can even help. Politics isn’t supposed to be entertaining. It’s the decisions that affect how we live our lives. We need comedy in politics like we need strippers in surgery.
what I’ve leant into hard is the idea that those “clever comebacks” or “murdered by words” posts and communities do much more harm than good. 80% of the post is the most bigoted and hateful thing you’ve ever read, and 20% is “your mom lol”. sharing hate speech with a lame joke tacked on the bottom is still sharing hate speech, turns out
“murdered by words” posts
I was an OG mod for that sub and hearing you say that makes me so sad.
Here’s some history for you; MBW started out with high quality long-form content. Then one day an Admin hand selected it to feature on the Front Page which caused it to explode in popularity, going from about 5,000 subs to over 30,000 in just 48 hours. The new users started upvoting the old content which caused a 2nd and then a 3rd post to organically hit the FP. The growth accelerated.
Later that week the sole mod had a panic attack over the stress and while melting down they deleted the whole sub. At that point I offered to help and they added me as Mod #2. My first official act was working with the Admins to restore the sub from backup. From there we built a moderation team and all of the crap that goes with it like sub rules, wiki, automod, Discord channels.
As the sub got more popular people started posting ever more short form content which was causing the quality to go down even while the subscriber and traffic numbers continued to climb.
A few of us fought hard for a long time to hold the line on quality content, wanting to keep with the higher quality long form content that made it popular even if it meant lower subscriber and traffic numbers. We tried a lot of things to accomplish that but relevant to your comment one of the things was to create “Clever Comebacks” as a place to push the tsunami of Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook dreck. Sadly it didn’t work, people either posted stuff in both places and / or the mod team wouldn’t remove short form content from MBW because it got too popular before it was noticed and they didn’t want to delete something with tens or even hundreds of thousands of upvotes.
As the mod team continued to expand to deal with the ever higher traffic first one then another Powermod was added. I strongly objected to it but was over ruled by Mod #1. Then the Powermods began to stuff the mod team with their friends and sock puppet accounts. That’s when things really started going downhill. They’d delete things that were almost popular then repost it themselves. They’d refuse to remove Posts or Comments from their friends or sock puppets. They implemented bots without sharing the source code. They kept “accidentally” breaking the mod log. They forced endless re-writes of the sub rules, each one giving them more leeway on what fit the sub and what didn’t.
I eventually went hands-off because I couldn’t stop them and couldn’t deal with what MBW had turned into. I finally left the mod team during the API fiasco because they wouldn’t hold the line on the blackout.
So there you have it, a short history of MBW and CC from someone who knows.
On a side note Powermods ruin everything they touch and they’re now showing up on Lemmy.
Counterpoint, comedy is often a coping mechanism for people dealing with difficult things, be it politics or something else. I’ll agree that it’s not how everyone wants to deal with it, though, and I also agree that not everyone does it in a way that’s constructive (but I think that’s in execution, not everyone is funny and a bad joke without proper comedy is certainly just elevating a bad message)
But I think if I didn’t have political comedy, I’m not sure how I could deal with how absolute shit things have been for decades. For me that’s not memes though, it’s stuff like Last Week Tonight or something that actually is done with professional writers and researchers.
I get that humor is useful for making hard topics seem easier but some things should be hard. Would you consider dirty jokes an appropriate substitute for a sex ed class? Would drinking away your nervousness be a good way to prepare for a driving test? Serious matters need to be discussed frankly and honestly.
I used to kind of like Oliver sometimes, but then I saw the pattern and it ruined it for me. Every episode is 'Hello joke>subject>mock subject if funny looking, else mock thing next to subject>let’s get serious, bad thing is happening>it’s really bad>but don’t get outraged enough to go do something about it, here’s someone else taking care of it for you>callback to joke earlier>HBO-brand anti-capitalist recuperation catharsis complete. Go back to work.
Kind of a false equivalence, since you’re not educating yourself on memes exclusively (and if you are, god help you lol). Even in your own reference, you can absolutely make dirty jokes after sex ed, especially if it helps you remember the topics. Good jokes will both reinforce the right narrative, make it more approachable, and help people remember what matters on a topic. Still has to be a good joke though, and humor is subjective so hard to gauge.
I mostly draw the line when it targets a vulnerable person or persons (like, let’s not joke about rape), or makes someone in the room uncomfortable out of respect for that person (like a dirty joke in front of grandma). I suppose one could say any joke about the assholes in charge fall under that first category, but they harm vulnerable people, but they themselves are perfect targets.
Almost no one does one thing to the exclusion of all else, so few, if any, people are getting their knowledge purely from memes, but it doesn’t have to be exclusive to have an effect. Someone who drinks a gallon of soda a day isn’t necessarily getting all of their nutritional intake from soda, and, to borrow the phrase, god help them if so, but it is going to have effects on their life. Treating politics as entertainment also has secondary effects. Just like drinking soda can train your tongue to expect that level of sweetness, which can lead to troubling dietary choices, political humor trains you expect a punchline in a discussion about policy, which can lead to bad political choices.
And notice there how you changed what I said to argue against a point I didn’t make. I talked about jokes as a substitute for sex ed. You talked about jokes after sex ed. There is no mandated political ed class after which to make jokes. The shallow coverage on things like Oliver, tiktok, or other comedy shows is often the deepest, or the only, examination of a political subject people actually ingest, maybe supplemented by a few headlines, a shallow newscast, and an article they didn’t finish. They aren’t making memes about the thing they learned during an in-depth intended-to-inform class. They are making memes based on the memes they laughed at because of the vague half-knowledge they got from the media atmosphere.
Jokes have their place. No one would argue for a life completely lacking in humor, but, just like your example of rape, a subject that is extremely serious because of the long lasting and possibly life-destroying effect it can have on people, politics is too serious to be joked about in the public sphere. Joking about it fails to take serious something that can leave someone alive, but utterly unable to live.
The “funny” parts of the internet like Twitter and Reddit are also owned by millionaires and billionaires, their express purpose being to entertain you and show you ads, not to actually inform you. An especially egregious example is YouTube when a video essayist tries to explain how the Native Americans were killed by colonists, or how most of Latin America was brutalized by capitalist oppression resulting in millions dead, and people have to bleep out their words like they’re on cable TV.
You might not be political, but the Nazis are, and they don’t really mind sending non-political people to the camps.
They seem to enjoy it, in fact. Memes are important, but so is freedom to meme.
It’s amazing how much still gets through, but at least I’m not scrolling past a dozen “news” stories between every meme or comic post.
My growing list
“If I don’t see it, it can’t hurt me”
I hear about everything I need to without it being every other post on my lemmy feed.
How could you possibly know what you don’t know?
I trust that the sources I follow give me the right information, because they did even before I used these filters.
I’m sure Republicans feel the same way about their sources. Good luck.
Not sure what the issue is. If I’m getting the same info as I would be here if there’s a problem? Why should I have two channels that give the same info?
Some people come here to relax, not be screamed at with outrage bait.
If you’re calling news outrage bait, I don’t know what to tell you. Orange Mussolini is counting on everyone to not keep up so nobody will stop him. I can’t name anything more pathetic than someone who wants ignorant bliss so badly they’ll put a blindfold on.
Yeah, I don’t mind the odd post. But those two help so much
Why are there so many people assuming every lemmy user is from the USA
Sometimes its bad for mental health to continuously see all the bad things that are happening in the richest country in the world
Same as Reddit, Americans don’t seem to be able to comprehend that there are other non Americans on the internet. It’s crazy.
Bonus points for people saying ‘here, where I’m from, not in my country’, they are all from the US. Anyone who mentions where they live with zero context and assumes you understand is a yank.
It’s always funny seeing non-Americans assume that the problems of America are unique to America and that anyone talking about those problems can only be from America.
I’m not amoroncan, but unfortunately what happen there have consequences for all of us
The general direction? Sure. The fact trump had his third dierrhea this month? I really don’t give a shit
It’s terrible for your mental health to be constantly bombarded with “the sky is falling” news.
“the sky is falling” is implying that what’s being talked about isn’t real. The rise in fascism is very real and very global.
I got ya
I would post more but I got this computer yesterday and have not transferred my old meme folder yet. Ah well
Subscribed !
I might occasionally be accused of being political, but yes. Lemmy is no escape. Many users from any instance will jam their politics into anything and everything, constantly. It’s genuinely weathering.
You want to vibe and chill? HOW DARE YOU! DONT YOU KNOW X IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!?!?!?!?
WHY ARENT YOU MAD ABOUT X??? ARE YOU A MONSTER??
Starting to think of unsubing from technology, too often it’s about trump and musk. But it’s also one of the largest communities.
Problem when most active communities at least sometimes include US political bullshit is that few are left without it if you just want to block it. We are not all Americans, it isn’t helpful to constantly have US bullshit showing up. Hopefully as lemmy grows the smaller communities will grow and I can have a feed full of kayaking, Linux memes and homebrewing.
I mean we live in a neo nazi fasict state. It was chill during bama years
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No, it was chill for you
Except for the brown people he droned that is
What bugs me about it is that it’s usually not even news, just outrage bait.
That’s what most news is
Well yeah, you’re on a social media site, not a news site. What do you expect? Everyone here to have a journalism degree or something?
